Augmented design and bionics workshop

Smart appliances through eco-identity

This research is related to the first use of the interconnected HIS (Hybrid Ideation Space) in an educational context, integrated in a 180-hour, third-year industrial design workshop. Three interconnected HIS systems were installed for the workshop—one in Milan, with two senior designers and a design innovation artistic director, an industrial design office and a representative customer (a leading European manufacturer of household appliances); and two HIS systems in Montréal used alternately by the 11 students in the design workshop, the academic coaching team and the research team.

The goal of the workshop is to promote co-operation and co-creation between the participants as a new approach for teaching design workshop practices.

The HIS (Hybrid Ideation Space) system is a hybrid technology (analogue and digital) that enables designers to be inside a shared representation, both locally and remotely. It is an intuitive immersive system that uses manual representations, free-hand sketches and rapid models to express design ideas. In the past five years, the HIS system was tested (Dorta 2007), compared (Dorta et al. 2008; 2009), used for individual design purposes and for co-located collaborative design (Dorta et al. 2009), and then two (and up to four) HIS systems were interconnected for remote collaborative design to create an augmented design studio (Dorta et al. 2011). This research was the first of its kind regarding the use of the augmented design studio in the context of an actual design workshop.